Category: visual

The Chicago Art Institute is shrinking its plans for an addition designed by Renzo Piano. “When museum officials announced plans for the wing in 2001, they envisioned a five-level structure of about 290,000 square feet, with 75,000 square feet of galleries. But the latest plans, approved Monday, foresee a slimmed-down structure of 220,000 square feet, with 60,000 square feet of galleries. Museum officials said they have raised $100 million. The project’s construction cost is now placed at $198 million.”

A man buried near Stonehenge 4000 years ago is giving a number of clues about the monument. “The first scientific results, from a burial already regarded as astonishing, are bewildering archaeologists but give clues which could solve the continuing mystery, despite innumerable theories and experiments, of how Stonehenge’s four-tonne bluestones were transported 240 miles from Preseli in the Welsh mountains.”

This week’s opening of the Museum of Modern Arts’ blockbuster Picasso/Matisse show has people wondering how MoMA’s temporary home in Queens will show itself. The blocks around the museum have been cleaned up, and the museum is anticipating large crowds. “Seeing fine art changes the way you look at the world. I hope that seeing the show here changes the way hundreds of thousands of people look at Queens.”

Why do critics so often rush to declare the “death” of painting? “The supposed death of painting springs in part from another misbegotten belief that each new art movement or technology renders earlier ones obsolete, that it is impossible to go backward once something has gone forward. Among the many holes in this theory is its simple defiance of history. The arts long have been cyclical, not just a forward unbroken continuum, and artists frequently look to the past for inspiration and reinvigoration.”

Toronto tycoon Joey Tanenbaum is donating $50 million worth of 19th Century European art to the Art Gallery of Hamilton. “Tanenbaum, a contrarian investor in art as in business, has amassed a flamboyant collection that probes some of the more eccentric corners of art production in that period. Since the 1980s, the pendulum has swung in art scholarship of the period, with interest turning from the well-known work of the Impressionists to the works of French academic and salon painters such as Jean Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau, as well as Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Doré, and the marketplace has followed suit.”

A British performance artist was paid £12,000 to kick a carton of curry through the middle of the town of Bedford. But the event was canceled today for “fear of too much interest” and large crowds. The proposed stunt got a lot of publicity this week after controversy when some declared the idea a “waste of taxpayers money.” The concept behind the take-away box performance was “to highlight rowdy Saturday night behaviour” and “destabilise and question this revelry by kicking a take away curry and carton from one end of the High Street to the other.”

After a decade of big spending on museum spending in London, last year the northwest pulled ahead. “Manchester and Liverpool profited to the tune of £100m with the money spent on two new culture palaces, one extension and one revamp, in a year when just £33.7m was spent on new or updated buildings in the capital.”

“One of the treasured objects lost in the Columbia space shuttle disaster was a painting of the Earth as it might look from the moon, created 61 years ago by a Jewish teenager in a Nazi concentration camp.”

Rome is so full of classic architecture, modern Romans have mostly shrugged their shoulders and said – can’t top that. “So it may be a surprise to learn that Rome is regaining its creative momentum. Over the past several years, the city has seen the launch of a series of major building projects designed to update its cultural profile. The first of these, a $157-million complex of three concert halls by celebrated Italian architect Renzo Piano, was unveiled in December. Two major civic projects by American Modernist Richard Meier are under construction.”

These are serious architects vying to design a replacement for the World Trade Center. “But the selection also underscores the degree to which commercial considerations and political maneuverings will determine what the final master plan will look like. What the Libeskind and Think designs share, to different degrees, is an ability to bend to the political needs of the various interests that control the site’s future, in particular downtown’s commercial power brokers. And in that sense, the designs say less about our collective ideals than about the limits of the democratic process when it comes to building in New York.”